(Being a five-minute talk on this topic given at one of Christian Michel's twice-monthly
meetings.)

My greatest fear is
quite predictable once you know that I am a libertarian. It is more
obvious to me than an elephant in the living room; it is the leviathan
(the state) in the entire country (indeed, at least one in every
country). In England it is partly the UK-state (largely ruled by Scotch
oligarchs for the benefit, if any, of non-South-East Englanders), and
partly the Euro-state (largely ruled by European oligarchs for the
benefit, if any, also of non-South-East Englanders).

Look at what the state does all the time. It takes away many of our
rights to do what we like with our persons and property. And it
increasingly often takes away more of those rights. It is perverse to
fear being robbed when every single week the state takes 25%+ or even
40%+ of our incomes (including so-called National Insurance: a tax on
employment unrelated to any real insurance scheme). And that is before
taxes on the products you buy. Plus the state often extorts further
amounts on an opportunistic crime basis, such as at least £100 billion
stolen from private pension funds by "prudent" Gordon Brown
(who is in reality a one-eyed Scotch pirate who ought to wear the
traditional pirate captain's patch). And there is also the never-ending
monetary inflation that is tantamount to counterfeiting: M4 has
accelerated to 14.4% for the year since October 2005[i]
(price inflation is always cited instead by the state because that is
masked by increased production; but discussing only price inflation is
like discussing only the visible part of an iceberg).

The main pretext for state involvement is to guarantee the provision of
essential services. What about education? Objective literacy and
numeracy rates continue to decline despite claims that examination
results are improving year after year. Or the National-Socialist Health
Service? A bottomless pit of inefficiency that absorbs ever larger sums
of tax-extorted resources yet provides fewer hospital beds than when the
NHS began; with growing waiting lists for treatment and an
ever-expanding bureaucracy whose staff notoriously now outnumber beds by
two to one. Or pensions? Far lower than they would have been had the
'National Insurance' money be invested in the private economy (and
insured) instead of a pay-as-you-go scheme that uses current taxes to
finance pensions for those already retired. Or non-state crime? Rising
all the time thanks to the hopeless state-police monopoly.[ii]

The state also uses our resources for a never-ending succession of
foreign military adventures. These are always pictured as noble crusades
but invariably result in more deaths and destruction than would ever
have occurred otherwise (including the entry into both world wars). In
Iraq the current figures from the latest Lancet article[iii]
estimate over 650,000 additional deaths due to the invasion (and all
this has been a major cause of both an actual terrorist attack and many
other alleged terrorist plots within the UK); while the opportunity cost
to the USA alone has been estimated at 3 trillion dollars. All non-state
criminal activity combined cannot begin to approach the amount of death,
theft and destruction that people tolerate from the state.

Consider what might have occurred if there had not been a state for the
last fifty years. The British state consumes about half of all that is
produced each year—year after year. The compound damage this does is
to slow all scientific, technological, economic and moral progress to a
tiny fraction of what it could and ought to be. Many, possibly all,
types of cancer might have been cured by now and even ageing (by stem
cell research or some other way as yet unguessed by us). Poverty might
still exist as a matter of definition, as it is a relative concept. But
the standard of living of the poorest quintile would be higher than that
of the richest quintile today. So poverty would not be a real problem.
Indeed, tolerating market inequality is the solution to any real
problems of poverty.

Most people do not fear the state—in fact, they love it. They are
convinced that the state provides a solution to all the problems that,
in truth, its very existence causes. The state has an inherently
aggressive and predatory relationship with its subjects, and enables its
subjects to prey on each other through tax-extorted subventions and
oppressive legislation passing for just law. This all amounts to what is
known in game theory as a negative sum game. By contrast, the
relationships among the members of a free society exemplify mutual aid
and amount to a positive sum game. Carl von Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of politics by other
means.” We can reverse this and see that politics is the continuation
of war by other means. But most people can't see it. People have to be
taught to fear the state as destructive and stupid. For the state rests
on their support. When their support eventually evaporates, as it will,
the state will fall. Only then will the political nightmare end and full
civilisation finally begin.

Top 50 books of all time : by Old Hickory:- "I have limited the selection to the books I have read. I keep to the norm of not recommending to others books I have yet to read. Clearly, books I have not read by now suggests a judgement of some sort."